My recent experience with slashdot resulted in me receiving 76,504 hits over 879,469 requests by the end of the day, 75% or more of which were directly from slashdot. Interestingly, slashdotters are not like my normal visitors–they have certain “unique” qualities.

First of all, Adsense. Even though I have twice as many clicks as normal, my clickthrough rates are 35% lower than normal. Slashdotters apparently shy away from all forms of advertising, and focus intently on content and trolling.

Second, Location. As you might expect, most slashdotters come from .com or .net domains:

251284 28.25% .net (Networks)
170544 18.03% .com (Commercial)
132370 14.95% [unresolved numerical addresses]
25227 3.26% .uk (United Kingdom)
23585 3.22% .au (Australia)
21773 3.04% .de (Germany)
23704 2.88% .nl (Netherlands)
20699 2.20% .edu (USA Higher Education)
18614 1.95% .ca (Canada)
11326 1.80% .fi (Finland)
22994 1.73% .at (Austria)
11597 1.65% .se (Sweden)
11042 1.39% .it (Italy)
9261 1.37% .fr (France)
8061 1.12% .be (Belgium)
11160 1.09% .jp (Japan)
7575 1.01% .dk (Denmark)

This is followed by a random pittering of Europe, and then Japan. Note that .edu is responsible for only 2.20% of my traffic. The obvious conclusion is that the readers of slashdot are not well-educated, and do not attend university for prolonged periods of time.

Third, the web-browser breakdown. Yes, we would guess these results–Firefox is popular:

Firefox (415208, 47%)
MSIE (316411, 36%)
Safari (78627, 9%)
Opera (25627, 3%)
Mozilla (19615, 2%)
Konqueror (16450, 2%)

For those aggregate 7% who are using Opera, Mozilla, or Konqueror, I feel really sorry for you.

Finally, the question you’re all most interested in. What do slashdotters run at home? There’s an easy answer: Microsoft Windows. 75% of the slashdot visitors ran some form of windows, 63% were using Windows XP. Feed that to the trolls, eh?

1 663968 21705 Windows
557340 18040 Windows XP
79584 2782 Windows 2000
16617 487 Windows Server 2003
5943 218 Windows 98
1957 87 Windows NT
1022 48 Unknown Windows
660 20 Windows ME
422 12 Windows 95
423 11 Windows CE
2 116621 4534 Unix
111202 4304 Linux
4336 178 BSD
990 47 SunOS
51 3 OSF1
17 1 Other Unix
25 1 HP-UX
3 96157 3342 Macintosh

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 12th, 2005 at 8:21 pm and is tagged with unresolved numerical addresses, dk denmark, fi finland, jp japan, prolonged periods, nl netherlands, clickthrough rates, ca canada, de germany, slashdot, obvious conclusion, microsoft windows, trolls, adsense, higher education, safari, firefox, web browser, windows xp, mozilla. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.

5 Responses to “What is a Slashdotter?”

1. mercedo says:

   11/12/2005 at 12:21 pm

   Ancient Greek Philosophers -18c Enlightenment Thinkers -SlashdottersThis is my signature.

   Reply
2. Michael Whalen says:

   7/20/2005 at 12:37 am

   A .edu domain implies that the visitor is on a college or other educational insitutes network. I think it would be more safe to say that the people who browse slashdot aren’t educators, rather than people who browse slashdot are uneducated.

   Reply
3. Andy Skelton says:

   7/13/2005 at 12:09 pm

   Note that .edu is responsible for only 2.20% of my traffic. The obvious conclusion is that the readers of slashdot are not well-educated, and do not attend university for prolonged periods of time.

   Hahahahaha! I love it!

   Reply
4. LHOOQ says:

   7/13/2005 at 5:39 am

   You shall be modded down for this! (Score: -100, Makes too much sense to your average Slashdot hack)

   Reply
5. Elliott Back says:

   7/12/2005 at 10:08 pm

   Yeah, I know this post is dying to be slashdotted, but bring it on, I say. This post is wonderfully gzipped, the CSS is gzipped, everything is cached, and there are no images here. Go on, I dare you.

   Reply